Buildzoid has recently been dabbling with an Nvidia GeForce 1070 card, trying his hand at overclocking a GPU architecture that he freely admits is pretty new to him (let’s be honest, he usually prefers to push AMD cards). His recent adventures have involved him performing a few hard-modifications to the card in an effort to get it to reach higher clocks and better scores. The upshot of all his hard works is that the card is now actually performing worse than at stock settings. How is this possible? Buildzoid reveals all in a video entitled ‘The Pascal Problem’.

In terms of settings he kicks off by showing us what’s going on with the GTX 1070 card, showing us the GPU-Z read out which indicates that the GPU has been pushed to have a boost clock 2,075MHz, a boost of 37.7% from stock settings. A boost that you would imagine to offer an improved score in 3Dmark Time Spy. Sadly that is not the case. Running Time Spy at this configuration we can see straight away that the fps readings are pretty low – around 25-30 fps throughout. Not the kind of performance you would expect. When he returns to card to default settings and runs the benchmark again, we end up with an average fps of 37.5. Welcome to the Pascal problem.

Buildzoid goes on to discuss his theories about what is actually going on. He proposes that the GPU has an in-build component which reacts to higher voltages and power draws. This reduces the performance of the card while still reading higher frequencies. In short, the hardware is doing something at higher voltages that software is ultimately unable to detect.